


Homecoming

by halcyo



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: (man in the tan jacket... got a new jacket...), NVHS, Night Vale High School, Second Person, no canon characters, yeah whatever happened to those pterodactyls?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-05-13 07:47:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5700613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halcyo/pseuds/halcyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why the hell did they cancel the homecoming dance? The pterodactyls? The robberies? The below-mediocre performance of "The Drowsy Chaperone" the year before?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

They cancelled the homecoming dance after several incidents. Personally, you blamed the theater, but you could never be sure.

First came the pterodactyls. A huge void the color of spilled ink opened up on the rock-climbing wall in the gymnasium. You ignored it, of course. Usually, unending voids meant that the track team was practicing. But halfway through the class, giant winged dinosaurs tore through the artificial night, interrupting your game of pickup basketball. That’s when you realized that it wasn’t the track team - they usually were a large group of raptors, but never pterodactyls. You tucked the basketball under your arm and tried to shoo them, but they escaped out the door and destroyed a trophy case with their stupid, clumsy wings.

The athletic department, of course, had to release an official statement: “Whoops,” the director said. “We _really_ meant to fix that, _honestly_. We just didn’t have the money,” he continued, shouting over the drone of construction for the new football training facility. (It came complete with artificial turf, a swimming pool, and several escaped felons equipped with Tasers and gladiator armor.)

Of course, nobody except for you and several other passersby actually heard the official statement, because he was shouting at a floating patch of haze, and everybody knew that the local paper had stopped hiring haze after what was now referred to as the Great Snowstorm of ‘08.

The mayor, who had recently passed a controversial law banning time travel, was naturally _very_ upset.

You didn’t care, really. The stupid rocks on the wall always wobbled when you stepped on them, and the protective mats almost never came down off of them. The gym teachers told you that it was to keep kids from climbing on it unsupervised, but it was _pretty hard_ to ignore the screams when the mats were down.

Then came the locker break-ins. You weren’t too worried about them until it happened to the locker next to yours. You walked into school one day only to find the kid holding a busted lock, blood and guts and viscera strewn about the hallway, bemoaning the loss of his algebra supplies. Now, this concerned you. You’d paid good money for that viscera, and it had really helped you grasp factoring! You convinced the kid to report the theft, and the next day, the principal called the entire junior grade down to the auditorium.

The local sheriff stood next to her. You shifted uneasily at his plain white mask, not unlike a plague doctor’s, and long, black robes. The principal explained that the administration was taking these reports very seriously, and that the thief would be caught. You weren’t quite sure how much you believed her. You had to meet with administration to drop French from your schedule, and after the required paperwork, parental signatures, and bloodletting, you’d followed the principal to find that administration was actually a group of seven white-tailed deer. She’d shouted at them, gesticulating wildly and scattering office supplies and various produce. But, hey, who were you to judge? You’d successfully dropped French. Maybe the deer could handle this, too.

As the principal spoke, the sheriff pulled a starling from the folds of his robe and crushed it in his fist. You took this to mean that there would be legal repercussions for the thief, too. Although, he could’ve just been ordering lunch. You weren’t really sure.

Then came the actors. Sure, backstage had protective sigils to keep the thespians trapped inside, as well as warning signs about the dangers of interacting with them (the attorney general had mandated them after the production of Mama Mia! your freshman year). But someone had scratched out the sigils, and when the custodians unlocked the doors the next morning, an actor ran outside, screaming quotes from Macbeth and throwing plastic skulls at them. Several more were gathered around a piano, covered in loose feathers, blood running from their many rows of jagged teeth, their flat, black eyes staring into nothing as they sang “Seasons of Love” from Rent. They were still there when students started arriving, even though the custodians followed all the necessary protocols, and the hospital barely had enough beds to hold all the victims. You were very grateful you’d decided to skip that day to catch up on your homework.

Then, of course, came the man in the pin-striped suit. You saw him while wandering the halls during your free period. Standing in a downpour, motionless in a charcoal-gray, pinstriped suit, gazing into the school about a hundred feet back, planted firmly in the dead center of the tennis courts. You stared into his face, remarkable in the way that it was completely unremarkable. If you saw the man at a party, you’d probably wave, maybe mumble a hello, only because he was vaguely and unsettlingly familiar, and you were afraid that you had met him before.

He was not a man you wanted to know.

That much you knew as you gazed at him. He remained, immobile, unblinking, perfect as a statue. And you were overcome with an impossible urge to open the door and let the man into your school.

So you did. Teenagers aren’t known for their understanding of consequences, and you were no exception.

The moment your hand rested on the doorknob, his head jerked upright, as violently as if someone was attempting to snap his neck, and fixed a cold, dead stare on your face. You remained rooted in your spot on the tile floor, entranced by the way he walked. He strode slowly, but with determination, so that he was for one moment and wasn’t in the next. When he reached the concrete steps of the side entrance, a horrible dread filled your body. You realized your terrible mistake, and within the same moment, you turned and started to run. A teacher leaned out of her classroom to scold you, but her face turned a ghostly shade of off-white as she saw the man behind you, pursuing you. It wasn’t that he was running. It simply seemed that now the man was absent in more moments than the ones he was in.

The school never found out it was you. They’d taken down the security cameras in favor of guard falcons, but they hadn’t yet figured out how to determine exactly what the birds had seen.

The man in the pin-striped remained in the school, though, and that was punishment enough. You dreaded each second spent in the hallway, waiting for him as you rounded a corner. You felt his stare, although you never saw it again, not once. Even at home, after the sun gave one last shout of light before the moon took over.

One day, you drove to the outskirts of town, got out of your car, and screamed as if sheer volume could change the events of the past few weeks. Nobody else knew about the man in the pin-striped suit hiding in the school. Nobody mentioned it. Nobody saw it. Or, maybe you were the one in the wrong. There was no man in the pin-striped suit. You were simply imagining things. Maybe.

As this thought occurred to you, you felt the gaze falling on your body again. You screamed louder.

At lunch the next day, you asked your friends if they saw the man in the pin-striped suit. They laughed at a joke you did not understand. One asked what time you’d gone to sleep. You grew flustered, angry, and demanded an explanation for the locker break-ins, the void, the destruction of the symbols. Who, if not the man?

They were no longer laughing after your outburst. Your chest heaved with the force of your anger. They looked at each other for a reason you did not understand. One asked you, in a sickeningly sweet voice of concern, if you were feeling alright. You shrugged because you did not have an answer, and you hoped that the gesture would be answer enough.

Later, you missed physics class for a schoolwide assembly. You felt an odd sense of relief as you sat down. They’d caught the man in the pin-striped suit. You’d be punished, of course, but at least he’d be gone. Instead, though, the principal said that she wanted to tell you the news before it reached the papers. You agreed. How terrifying it would be to hear that you’d had a stranger in your midst for so long, and how terrifying it would be to know that you’d been unaware.

Then she said that, after the pterodactyls had destroyed part of the gym, some students from the track team had continued to trash things so the school would buy new equipment. Because their insurance would not cover the damage, the school could no longer afford to throw a homecoming dance. They made no mention of a man in a pin-striped suit.

And you knew there was only one way to fix your mistake.

They called it the worst crime in years. That all that was left of the victim was a scrap of his pin-striped jacket. They called for the outright banning of theater from public schools. Two thespian attacks in three weeks just proved that it was too dangerous, and that it should be replaced with safer activities, like yodeling or body identification. It was just too easy for the actors to get loose.

And they were right. It had been easy.

So, yeah, they’d cancelled the homecoming dance. Maybe it was partially your fault. Now a whole lot of people had a whole lot of dresses that had cost a whole lot of money that they couldn’t return. But, hey, that part wasn’t your fault. Neither was the pterodactyl void. So you blamed the insurance fraud. And the stares faded into nothing but a bad memory.

Until the day you walked into school and found a broken lock dangling off your locker, with a scrap of pin-striped fabric caught in the hinge. You didn’t open your locker that morning, afraid of the nothing you’d find there and all that it implied.


End file.
